{"id":547436,"date":"2010-04-29T14:23:53","date_gmt":"2010-04-29T18:23:53","guid":{"rendered":"tag:consumerist.com,2010:\/\/1.10005153"},"modified":"2010-04-29T14:24:42","modified_gmt":"2010-04-29T18:24:42","slug":"why-does-amtrak-charge-me-extra-to-use-my-student-discount","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/547436","title":{"rendered":"Why Does Amtrak Charge Me Extra To Use My Student Discount?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Consumerist reader Rachel was recently trying to book a train trip from Washington, D.C., to Newark, NJ, on Amtrak’s website and ran across a bit of a snag — When she attempted to claim the Student Advantage discount, her ticket was suddenly $13.90 more expensive.<\/p>\n

Here’s how Rachel tells it:<\/p>\n

Tonight I went online to buy an Amtrak ticket for next month (5\/22) on the usually expensive Northeast Corridor Line though I lucked out and was able to find a $49 ticket. Coupled with my Student Advantage Discount, I was pretty pleased that for once I wouldn’t be paying a ridiculous sum to ride the rails. However, when I put in my information for the discount, the price of the ticket jumped to $62.90.<\/p>\n

Does Amtrak have some sort of policy against using discounts on fares lower than $50? It seems pretty ridiculous to be unable to take advantage of your discount at all times (excepting the policy that tickets must be bought no later than 3 days in advance), but hey, that’s me.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We were able to replicate Rachel’s situation and got the exact same results. And when we tried one of the higher-price fares listed for that day, the Student Advantage discount was actually a discount.<\/p>\n

Looking at the Amtrak page that details the Student Advantage program<\/a>, there doesn’t appear to be anything in the listed limitations regarding a threshold at which the discount no longer applies.<\/p>\n

Our best guess is that, aside from a computer glitch, Amtrak considers the $49 fare as an already-discounted rate, but then Rachel should have gotten a message that she could not combine the discounts instead of a higher price.<\/p>\n

Below are screenshots of the fare with and without the Student Advantage “discount.”
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\"Same<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Consumerist reader Rachel was recently trying to book a train trip from Washington, D.C., to Newark, NJ, on Amtrak’s website and ran across a bit of a snag — When she attempted to claim the Student Advantage discount, her ticket was suddenly $13.90 more expensive. Here’s how Rachel tells it: Tonight I went online to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5519,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-547436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5519"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=547436"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547436\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=547436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=547436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=547436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}